


Sailor's Sorrow

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Depression, Fix-It, Gen, Leonard Snart Lives, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mick Rory Has Issues, Orpheus and Eurydice Myth, Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Freeform, Wizard of Oz, dante's inferno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 07:08:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9310676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: Sailors tell the same tales everywhere you go.Sometimes, they tell you how to bring someone home.(an Orpheus and Eurydice retelling - and a bit more besides)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: I wish you'd write a fic where, to save Len, Mick must find his soul/heart/presence in the void the Oculus left (somewhere in the wreckage of all the shattered timelines) and bring it back. AKA a coldwave Orpheus and Eurydice AU
> 
> it...started there, anyway

Sailors tell the same tales everywhere you go.

Different languages, different cultures, different people, but in the end it always comes down to them and the sea: stories of danger, stories of wonder, stories of strange things you can't even begin to imagine.

Mick Rory was born on land, as far away from a coast as you could go in his continent.

Kronos was born to the sea. 

The Time Masters belittle it when they call her the Time-Stream, their pathetic and futile attempts to make it less than it is, to make it something they can understand, something they can _master_. 

She is no mere stream: she is Oceanus and Tethys, Varuna and Varuni, Anahita and Aegir and Ryūjin and Idliragijenget, all of them together, the great Tiamet who blankets the world entire. She is the Many-Named, the Inexorable, the Endless, Time in all its forms: all oceans come from her, and she is both the greatest of them all, and yet beyond them. She is the slow, rolling wave, the quiet calm, the swiftly rushing current that carries the many-mirrored universe ever forward in her hands, gentle and rough in turn, and she had no beginning but is in herself the whole of creation entire. 

And, like all seas, there are those who sail her, and their stories. 

It’s on a mission for the Waverider when he first hears of it. 

It’s just another boring day in, day out, honestly. Travelling to different time periods rather loses its shine when all you ever see are people being people the same the world over, different architecture, different languages, different clothing, but the same nevertheless—the Tower of Babel was a lie: it did nothing, nothing at all, because in the end people are people no matter when and where and nothing can make that untrue—and not a single soul on the Waverider had Len’s passionate creativity, his bold recklessness, his sense of humor that could turn even the dullest outing into a thrilling adventure.

He’d rather be going to a grocery store to get a loaf of bread with Len than breaking into the Winter Palace with the Waverider. 

For this mission, he was sulking around a pirate’s bar in his Kronos gear, faithfully recreated to his specifications by Gideon. The others on the ship had not believed him at first when he had said that his reputation preceded him and would still be valid, accepted by all, but he had proven them wrong, and now they used his dual persona in the same clumsy way they wielded all their weapons. 

He opted not to mention that he was not the first Kronos, and that as he travelled through Time he had met others, time remnants, who saw him and looked upon the shape of their future. He had the feeling it would disturb them to know it, this crew that sails the sea of Time but never loves and fears her like a sailor ought.

Len would have laughed in devilish glee.

He misses Len like a stab wound that never heals.

Time is meant to cure all things, they say, but those that said that never rode Time’s currents and mastered its complex navigation, never found their bearings in a place that knows neither set time nor place, never flung themselves forward upon the currents of always and forever, never turned sail to the winds of Fate and spat in the face of destiny. 

There are no lighthouses to guide the way through Time, no signs to show you the hidden shoals and reefs that could wreck the finest sailor’s ship, no; this sea so bright that no light could shine through but that of the human soul.

Len was a light so bright that he sometimes thought it should have been seen for miles, for years, for _centuries_. 

His chosen rival, the Flash, shines bright and blazing as well. They should have had that, that glorious clash that echoes through the ages, brightness enough to light the path home for a thousand lost sailors’ souls. 

But Len is gone: the light has gone dark, and he sails onwards blind and without a friend. 

And then one day he hears it.

“They say it’s a black hole,” the old man croaks from the corner of the bar, his eyes bright and black and shining like beetles. He clutches his pitcher in his hand, but does not drink; he sits by the fire, old and wiry and just as mad as the rest of them, time-sailors all. “Brand new, where it oughtn’t be. Someone ripped that hole into Time herself, they say. The hole – the Endless Pit, the Time-Stop, the End of All Things. It is a pathway to the land of the dead.”

“By which you mean that anyone who follows that path ends up dead,” another younger man scoffs.

But the old man shakes his head. “It’s happened before,” he says. “It will happen again. A pit, a pathway: the brave may go forth through and seek their dead, and if they are brave and strong and true, they may call them forth once more. Time itself will yield up her prey to he who braves the deepest of the still waters.”

“It’s a myth,” a third man scoffs, drinking deep. “It’s nothing more than death-trap.”

“It’s true,” the old man insists. “I lost my love, who I thought I loved more than life itself, and I walked Charybdis to find her.”

“Did you bring her back?” someone asks.

He is somehow unsurprised to find out a few seconds later that it was him. 

“I was not true,” the old man says bitterly. “I had a sister, a family, an audience, all waiting for me back home, and I loved them the more, though I would not admit it; I brought my love almost all the way out, but failed my tests, and she disappeared again into the deep.”

Hidden by his Kronos helmet, he swallows, staring at the old man, half-remembering a story Len once told him, a silly snippet of nothing, an amalgamation of tales that Len found in books, in movies, in libraries – nothing at all, and yet he remembers –

He strides forward abruptly, and grabs the old man’s hands, pulling them loose of the tankard and turning his fingers up.

The old man’s fingers are callused deep and hard, each one formed from years of savage beatings in the name of passion, and the weapon a string of gut in a harp of bone. 

He looks at the man.

“Yes,” the old man hisses, voice low and silky, his beetle-black eyes shining with all the colors of an oil spill. “I am he of whom they speak, for I mourn my loss until the end of Time herself, and speak of it to all.”

“Heard they ripped you apart till only your head was left,” he replies. “In a fit of madness.”

“They did,” the old man says. “But they could not bear to lose me, or my gifts, and so they stitched me back together after. I can only tell you where the path is, and how to follow it; the trials are different for each man.”

“But you will tell me,” he says, knowing it to be true.

The old man looks upon him and there is pity in his eyes. “How could I not?” he asks. “You have lost everything – even your name.”

And he knows that the old man is correct. 

Kronos is too tight a fit, a slave-name given to him by his masters to make others fear him; Mick Rory is too loose, for that name had become a half name, meant to cover one-of-two, Len-and-Mick, and not one alone. Heatwave is a name he held but briefly, a gift from a lover, an apology, never truly claimed as his own and yet it is all that he has left: the name, the gun, and the ring.

Len also left him a mission. 

If he were better – if he were true – he would stay with them, he would do his job, he would return to the gray walls and the endless days of the Waverider, to mockery and to use, and suffer them gladly as fit punishment for having not been a better friend. But he is not better: he is true only to Len and not to Len’s wishes. He cannot go forth much longer without Len by his side.

He has already started to seek oblivion to return to Len’s side, and Len wouldn’t have ever wished for that. 

“What can you tell me, then?” he asks, forsaking the last of that which he was given. He will not be returning to the Waverider today, not without Len; one way or the other, he will find Len once more.

The old man dips his head into a nod, a recognition, and the others in the bar forget them as if they had not been there, neither of them: these others do not have a black hole in their hearts to echo the one in reality, the sort that is needed to hear these words, this story; this story is not for them. Not yet, and if they are lucky, not ever. 

The old man may be an omen of doom, a trap in glittering tempting form, as the sailors say, or he might be the guide to salvation. 

At this point, he-the-nameless, he who was once Mick Rory and at last has hope that he may yet be that again, does not care.

“Tell me,” he says a third time, and there is some use to Len’s half-learned religion – to ask three times turns the key and opens the gate, and shows those who are truly willing from those whose will shall fade in time. “Tell me where to go.”

“You know where it is,” the old man says.

“The Vanishing Point,” he replies, finding that he does know, after all. He’s always known.

It is the path he must yet learn. 

“You must follow the albatross to find your way,” the man says. “She will lead you to where you need to go. But be careful – if you err upon your path, the albatross will take from you until you have no more to give, and take yet more than that.”

Another memory drifts up, fragile and precious, Len younger and happy, letting him lay his head in his lap, and Len read to him aloud –

“Water, water everywhere,” he says, echoing words he had not known that he recalled. “And not a drop to drink.”

“There is a greater hell than death,” the old man says, and his voice is weary, his eyes distant. “And it is to be lost in in the sea of memory forever.”

He can imagine it well – every touch a memory, every sight and sound and smell summoning recollection, and yet never able to go forth into reality once more – and he does not need to imagine it at all.

It is his life every day, even now.

“There are those whom Time cannot heal,” the old man tells him, and he knows that it is true. They are the damned of Time, who have no succor but desperation. “I wish you luck.” 

He nods, and goes.

Finding the ship is easy enough – the time pirates fear him and honor him and worship him, or at least the suit that he wears, and one is more than happy to convey him back to the ship which he molded to his own use long ago and left behind only for Len, a finer prize by far – and he takes it as no more than his due, stepping back upon her, master and commander once more.

He takes her sailing.

No rough-formed AI for him this time, no; no Barry Allen working wonders with code and the Speed Force, bringing the future forward in time in a backwards threading that only speedsters can do. He guides the ship himself, and its ghost is silent in honor of his task, and he rides the crest of the wave to his destination.

The Waverider’s crew sees only the utility of the current, not the beauty. Even Rip turned deaf ears to the tempest outside, Time Master to the depths of his soul even once he spurned the organization; he covered his eyes with maps and his ears with his ghostly navigator, and he turned his back upon it so as better to focus on his plots and his hopes and his dreams, which in the end were not so dear to him as he thought they were. And the crew Rip gathered, the crew Rip left behind – the crew knows _nothing_. They see a uniform green, a blank highway, where he sees swirls and knots, bends and currents and flows, roaring storms larger than Jupiter’s and little break-tides so gentle and sweet it could bring tears to your eyes.

They know nothing of it. He knows it all.

Some part of him was born to it.

He was - and here he smiles - always capable of handling extremes.

He contains multitudes. 

He tacks and turns, steering expertly through the shoals and back into regular space far enough away that he can see that which is his goal, and oh, the sight of it is enough to shake a man's soul. 

Charybdis, the Boundless Whirlpool, the Storm of Storms, the Great Eater, Ship-Crusher, Life-Ender, the Hole In the Universe, the End of All Hope - the sailors give them many names.

Science calls them black holes.

Gravity roils its bindings here, pulled so close and tight as to squeeze out all else, physics free at last of the chains of rules. Life herself yields up her domain, energy over matter at last. The swirling mass churns around the outside, swirling as through in a drain, atoms tearing apart in the fury of the storm, colors beyond colors ever yet imagined by living being, and in the center – ah, in the center, there is nothing but a dark so deep that the eye cannot understand it. It is beyond black, it is _nothing_ , and to contemplate it is to contemplate madness. 

Nietzsche’s abyss: entropy itself, king of death, enthroned in all its glory in the land of the dead where even the universe itself cannot reach but can only pour itself into, draining itself of all that makes it what it is, stars and planets and even space itself, consumed into the nothingness.

_Abandon all hope, ye who would enter here._

The sailors of Time fear this danger above all others. 

When the Time Masters took him, they put him in a machine built along the models of this, the great monster of the deep, the fears that haunt the dreams of all living creatures. Their machine tore apart his soul into its component atoms to mix it back into Kronos, but the machine failed, where it never failed before, because all of him, every last part, down the atoms, was marked by Len. Len’s life, Len’s light, Len’s spirit, Len’s mind: they tore him apart, but they could not take that memory away from him. He might have forgotten it, for a time, but the raw star-stuff of his body always remembered. 

The first time Kronos beheld a Great Eater, he did not think of the stories shared furtively in the nighttime dark of barracks of the Time Master’s captive hunters. He did not think of gravity, or of science, or even of myth and fairytales and children’s dark delight, nor even of the nightmares that can only be recalled in part when you awaken because to remember all is to lose that which keeps you together.

He thought instead of Len, smiling in delight, holding out in his hands a tape of such ancient vintage that all Kronos knew would sneer at it, and of Len’s hands, cool and long and perfect, fingers clenching against Mick’s as a horse got stuck in the mud and fell prey to sadness, of the stone giant that was eaten by the world-consuming Nothing.

That’s what he sees, when he looks upon the Storm of Storms. 

_Nothing_. 

Len.

It was that thought of Len that brought him from himself, that reordered what the Time Masters had mixed up, that gave him a mind of his own instead of a mere body to be puppeted at the Time Masters’ will. It was that thought – _Len_ – that gave him hope.

If he is to find hope once more, he must find Len, and to find Len, he must offer up his soul to the Great Eater and hope against hope itself that the king of the damned will find his sacrifice worthy.

And if it doesn’t work, well –

He can’t imagine a better place to die than here, where Len burst open the dam of Time and let it run wild through the many worlds. Worlds of echoes, worlds of paths untrod, the roads more and less travelled, worlds so different in tone that life scarcely can recognize itself in the faces of its kin, worlds so similar that a single flap of a butterfly’s wings is all that changed. 

The great sea of Time contains them all.

He waits, patient, his hand on the helm, guiding his ship’s prow to stillness, his mind on the waves, his ship beating back against the sirens of death, gravity herself singing temptation and pulling gently for him to come nearer, to come close, to come to them and never return. Up and down, bottom and top, strange and charm – those are the sirens that sit at the foot of Charybdis and smash the sailors who fall into their arms.

He will not fall.

The old man said he would be guided by the albatross. 

He watches, sentinel and silent witness, as a nebulae barely born gives in to the lure of Fate and belches forth her many colors, streaming towards the hole but never touching it, watches as the Eater drinks down her fiery heart. No more stars will be born here; this is their graveyard. 

This is where he lost his North Star, his guiding light, and it is here, he hopes, that he will find him once more. 

He holds on hope, his hope, his _Len_ , who may be there, in the land of the dead, waiting for him. 

And then he sees her.

A white dwarf, soaring through space, arrowing straight towards the very center of the Pit, a glorious elongated streak of white with the wisps of the colorful nebulae drifting in her wake, draped along her shoulders like a gossamer-thin shawl, an angel descending into the deep as though to light the way by her very presence: Beatrice, she was called by one man; by another, Eärendil.

To the eyes of a third, she was an albatross.

His fingers clench upon the helm.

 _Len_.

Where there is hope, there is life. 

And oh, he hopes, he hopes, how he _hopes_.

His hands move on instinct, a sailor’s knowledge sunk deep in his bones, and he follows her trail, his ship flying into the cloud that she leaves behind her like a lighted path which he hopes will lead him to salvation. His ship floats between the gas and the debris, the shining rock and the glittering ice, and he follows her on her sure path into the deep.

He hopes.

He keeps as closely on her tail as he can, until his ship groans beneath him in protest at his nearness to that incandescent heat, next to which even Lucifer in his original glory would be shamed, and his hand is steady, his gaze firm, and he does not stray from his path no matter how the gravity breaks upon his ship, no matter how Time itself begins to fray around him.

He hopes. 

It could be seconds, it could be a million years, but he does not care. He follows his albatross, his hope, and he follows her into the dark.

He _hopes_.

His ship screams beneath him.

He might scream himself, he's not sure.

And still he follows.

He follows, he follows, he follows, his whole attention fixed upon nothing more than that white point ahead, that glowing ember, and then -

It's dark.

He might be dead.

He finds himself rather unsure about the whole matter.

His fingers cannot feel, his eyes cannot see, his ears cannot hear, and yet there is something of him alive: he has no mouth, and yet must scream. 

_why do you come here_

There is no voice in this place, if this is a place and not hell.

For hell is empty, Len told him once, and all the devils are here.

_why do you come here_

Len.

_you come for one of the dead_

Yes.

Little by little, he feels himself come together. Atom by atom, electrons intertwining, neutrons locking together and forming strands, elements being built from dust, dust to dust, like all living things, the materials of a dying star regrouped in just the right order to make a man. 

He is a man.

He is alive.

His ship is - he knows not where. He thanks her in his mind for her service, and spares a moment to wish that her death not be in vain, for a sailor loves his ship, loves her passionately, but not as much as he loves the sea. 

Not as much as he loves Len. 

He has lost Kronos' armor. He finds himself clad instead in stardust, in his favorite set of heavy pants with many pockets, his shirt a few buttons loose, his heavy fireman's jacket to protect him from the element he loves most.

_you come here, nameless one, to collect your dead_

He turns, his body his own once more, and regards the Throne.

There are no words that can describe it, the King of the Void in Darkness. He is formless; he is all forms; he is anti-matter and matter cannot comprehend him, the one true unknowable beyond the reach of all science. Death is his handmaiden, not his definer, and Might herself cowers before him. He inspires neither wonder nor horror: there is no room for anything but awe. Gods are born and die in the blink of his eyes, Olympian and chthonic both. 

This is He who all life has sought in desperation to name, and yet He is Nameless.

Honestly, he's not entirely sure He is a He at all, or if He is, it is only one of his many faces.

_what will you give for your dead_

He would laugh, if he could; what would he give? He is no Orpheus, here to win love with a song that brings forth sadness in all who behold him; he is no scholar, no poet, no hell-raiser. 

He has nothing to offer but his hope.

_and that hope is beautiful_

_it shines a light no matter where it goes_

_even here where there is no light_

If there were room in his skull, he would feel something, he's sure: relief, perhaps. But there is nothing, nothing but awe, and hope, and the voice. 

His hope is enough.

_the way will not be easy_

_there are tests_

He will do what he must, what he can, and if he fails, so be it.

_yes_

_go forth now_

_be wary, nameless traveler, for you have many miles to go before you may rest_

There is a path beneath his feet, leading away from the throne.

Len laughs in his mind, another memory springing forth to just behind his lips and eyes, and the path solidifies into golden brick. 

He takes one step, on to the road. He takes another. 

Turning his back on the throne is the hardest task of his life to date, and he knows that it is nothing compared to what lies before him. 

But if he succeeds - if he's true -

It will be worth it.

The path is long, and he must walk every mile. 

He walks.

And then there it is.

The first test.

The oldest story had three heads to tame before he could proceed; the nearest named four times fifty living men that cursed the sailor with their eye - 

He groans when he sees what obstacle he must pass.

No Cerberus for him, oh no, nor allies lost.

His first test is to confront his murdered dead.

He has killed -

There are so _many_.

But he has his path, and he has his test, and he has his hope.

And so he goes.

He walks along the path, and the path leads him forward, and then he is wading into the sea of spirits that stand between him and his goal.

His hope, his Len, for whom he would do anything.

He is anticipating that his dead hate him, he expects hands upon hands to rip him apart. 

He is wrong.

“I do not care about you,” drawl the ghosts of the men in the mine. “I never even knew I died.”

“I have my own ghosts,” say the soldiers from the past, Capone’s and Germany’s and others still. “I have no room to fight you, too.”

“I wronged you,” say his rivals, his opponents, criminals like him, shrugging it off: honor among thieves, even in the end. A match fairly played between unfair men: the possibility of loss accepted. “And I know it.”

And once those melt away, then and only then, there they are. His hateful dead. The ones he killed, the ones he hurt, the sins of his life there to stop him in his tracks the way he once stopped them in theirs.

“You killed me,” they hiss. “You hurt me. I had more I wished to do. Your fault, your fault!”

Their fingers grow into claws, their eyes glow with fire, and their heads are haloed by spitting snakes, and they reach for him, and he flinches - his eyes shutting in anticipation of terrible pain, for there is no vengeance like that of the angry dead -

“I love you.”

What?

He opens his eyes.

“I love you,” says the ghost that stands between him and the Furies that lust for his blood, and he cries out in pain.

It is his mother.

“I love you,” she says a third time. “I forgive you. It was an accident.”

“I love you,” the shade of his father says, stepping forward to stand beside her.

“I love you,” the children whisper, gathering around him.

His brothers. 

His sisters.

They gather around him as he walks, tears slipping down his face, and though the Furies around him rage, they guard him.

And around them - 

“You gave me food when I had none,” a small child says. She had come by the restaurant where he had once worked, thin and starving, and his fingers were light enough to vanish the food he left out deliberately into her pockets. He never saw her again.

“You defended me from pain,” a boy scarcely past adolescence says. He had been in prison for the first time, a friendship badly chosen and a dare gone wrong; the others had looked upon him as prey. He had defended him for the few weeks he was inside; they had never spoken.

“You taught me a trade,” a man says. He had been bumbling and foolish; he had strength and size, and they were to be used, but he had no skill. They had met in the gym, and he had taught the man what he knew, and the man did not die the first time he went into battle under the Family's command. The next time they met, they did not recognize each other.

“You saved me,” an old woman says, and he remembers her, remembers how she had been dying, her heart giving out, and he had ruined one of Len's carefully timed plans to get her to the hospital. Len had never held it against him. He never found out what became of her. 

He did not help these people for love, nor satisfaction. He just – helped. Because there wasn’t any reason not to.

There are bad deeds he has done in his life - the darkest, the meat of the Furies – but there are also good deeds, good will he spread through the world for no reason and no cause and no demand for payment, and he has enough, just enough, to get him through the sea of dead and to climb the path upon the other side. 

She is waiting for him there.

Her lips were red, her looks were free; her locks were yellow as gold; her skin was white as leprosy -

The nightmare Life-in-Death was she.

“Lisa,” he says, the name a sigh of breath, barely spoken.

She turns to him and smiles. Her teeth shine in the dark. And she reaches forward and takes his hand in hers.

His blood runs thick with cold.

“Come,” Life-in-Death says. Dante imagined her as Virgil, statue and teacher stepped down and come to life, his companion to lead him down and down; the oldest songs called her Despair, she of the crooked hook that she slides into the hearts of men to drag them low. 

He can only see her as Lisa, much-beloved and much-wronged. He told her of her brother's death and watched as she grew colder than ever before, her brother's ice climbing around her heart. 

They have been companions for some time now, Life-in-Death and he. 

“Come,” she says.

The path is long, the path is hard.

“Come,” she says, and guides him onwards.

There is a swamp beyond the sea. 

The trees are old and withered and bent; their roots curl down and their branches droop. The golden bricks are barely visible beneath the muck and grime. It sticks to his boots, it sticks to his pants. It makes him heavy. It makes him slow.

He is a lumbering beast, trudging through the mud. 

Mindless. Stupid. _Dumb_.

Why does he keep trying? There's no point. It's obvious he won't succeed. There was never any chance of succeeding: he was doomed from the start. Everything he touches dies. Was not the sea of dead enough to show him that?

He used up all his good deeds in getting this far.

He's just a criminal, in the end. Just an arsonist. A sick man, who can't stand by himself, useful to nobody and no-one.

Even the Legends knew he was worthless and they were heroes.

He trudges through the swamp.

It's harder and harder to lift his feet.

God, why _is_ he doing this? If he just stops, if he just dies, he'll be dead, and that'll get him to the same result, won’t it? He’ll be by Len’s side again. If he keeps trying, he'll just mess everything up. He'll make it all burn down. He'll turn it all to ash.

Everything he tries turns to ash.

Every endeavor he begins.

Every plan he joins -

 _Len's_ plans.

He ruined those, too, every one of them; he dragged Len down with him, he -

Len laughs in his mind, gleeful and manic; the memory sharp as ever. He reaches out his hand to him, a shared joke, a shared adventure, a shared life, and –

“We dawdle a bit,” Len sings on the way to a job, the memory faint and distant but growing stronger. “And then - we loiter a while, and dawdle again. We gather our strength - to start anew - on all of the loafing and lounging we still have left to do –”

He frowns, and something stirs in the base of his mind.

Something about a swamp.

“Why did we become criminals?” Len had asked him.

“Because we hate working and love money,” he had told him.

There was something –

About a swamp.

“Don't,” he rasps, and his voice is dry and it hurts to speak. It's so much effort - and what a waste! It won't help. Won’t help at all. Just a waste of time, like everything else; a waste of energy, a waste of a life –

Len sang this to him once.

“Don't,” he says again. “Don't say –”

It's pointless. 

He'll never remember it.

“Don't say there's - there's - there's nothing –”

Nothing, nothing, nothing, that's all he is.

Nothing.

_Nothing._

He remembers.

“Don't say there's nothing to do in the doldrums,” he forces out through numb lips. This was Len's favorite movie, and the one he raised Lisa on, and even if he pretended later that it was something slightly more respectable, Star Wars or Lord or the Rings or something, it was never true. This was it; this was the one old tape he wrapped his childhood around. “It's just – not – true.”

It's not true.

None of it.

_This is not true._

A child’s movie: the swamp of despair, of apathy, of thoughtlessness, which can be conquered only by thought and will and _want_. The Doldrums that would just as soon eat you alive, make you stop thinking, make you stop-stop-stop – and the only way out is to march straight through regardless. 

He bares his teeth and speeds up.

Maybe he is a failure, maybe he is dumb, maybe all of that is true.

But he has his hope, his hope that it will get better once again, and he will _not_ fail.

Life-in-Death snarls, robbed of her prey.

Her hook is still lodged in his heart, her sadness and her despair and her apathy still lodged in his brain, but he will not yield. Not now. Not when there’s Len to think of, and god, Len is _all_ he thinks of.

Len is what pulls him through and makes him forget not to care. 

The swamp ends.

His boots are clear, his pants are dry; the mud of the Doldrums cannot hold him now.

Life-in-Death has challenged him, and he has overcome, and so she turns and leads him onwards.

But there is more yet to come.

He follows the path.

Given the color of the bricks beneath his feet, he's almost unsurprised when he comes upon the gates of Dis, glittering and green. 

No jeweled city for him, though, no.

It's a prison.

A prison made of glass and metal and twinkling stone, a hundred memories of confinement. The towers of Iron Heights, the depths of the gulag, the twisting turns of Chicago, the glaring weight of the Tombs in New York, and more and more and more - 

And inside the prison there is a chair.

He moans.

He knows what test he must face here.

It is a test he has faced before.

This is the prison of the Self. 

He walks forward, and he meets himself, reflected in a thousand mirrored planes.

Face twisted in greed, face twisted in hate, in rage, in fury, and worst of all, in the calmness of premeditation. He wore this face many times before – but the last one, the calm of death-inside, he only wore once.

He walks, and he sees:

Kronos sits upon the chair, with rusted chains looped around his arms and legs, and regards him with disdain.

“How low I have fallen,” Kronos says to him. 

“How high I have risen,” he retorts. “To be you is to be a slave: I have cast off your name.”

“I was the most feared of the Hunters,” Kronos responds. “None heard of me but that despaired; My hunt was inexorable; I never tired nor weakened, and my prey never escaped me.”

“You were a dog,” he says. “You barked at the order of your masters.”

“I was strong, and nothing could hurt me.”

“You were alone,” he says, and that is the end of it. 

Kronos bows his head. The chains about him crack and break, the rust eating away at them at the last, and they burst forth –

And then Kronos is gone.

There is only what he carries with him.

That was the easy part.

He turns next to regard what he once called himself. 

“You left them behind,” Mick Rory, forty-three years old, Legend and sometimes even a hero, accuses him. “Len trusted you, and you betrayed him, and you left him behind, too, and he hated you in the end.”

“I love him,” he says. It is not a defense. It is a fact.

“You threw away the gift he gave you,” Mick Rory, Heatwave, enemy of the Flash and supervillain of fire, tells him. “He wanted you to join him, and you left him to the mercy of his father.”

“I love him,” he says. It is not a defense. 

“You destroyed him,” Mick Rory, criminal and husband, burning with the flame of a cursed warehouse, says. “You drove him away; you made him abandon you, and you tore out his heart.”

“I love him,” he says.

“Why do you persist?” Mick Rory, younger than the rest, a groom, wearing a ring and promise, says. “Your crimes are not merely against the world; they are against him. Why would he want you still?”

“I love –”

“Why did you hurt him?” Mick Rory, youngest yet, fifteen and foolish and not even knowing that the heat that licked his heart was love. Tears stream down his face. “Why?”

“I love him,” he says, weary beyond weariness, sad beyond sadness. There is no defense but this: “I will not judge myself for him.”

They stand aside, the hollow men, the old skins which he has worn and was and has since cast off behind him, the soul of him carrying forth to be the person that includes all of them but is not bound by them, and they let him pass.

There is a garden outside, silent and dead, and beyond the garden there is a door.

The gate is locked shut, but the path continues.

On the door it is written: _He who was living is now dead – and those of us still living are dying, with patience._

After the agony in stony places, the shouting and the crying, prison and place and reverberation –

He knows what he must do now.

He takes a breath in, pulls it all inside himself, everything he was, a tight ball of feelings and thoughts and memories, and he breathes it out, letting it go.

The gateway opens.

He walks on, and leaves himself behind, and goes forth truly nameless.

The pathway leads him down to a valley. 

The stories tell of a test of trust: do not look back, traveler, and she will follow upon your feet.

The stories do not tell that there is first another test.

 _Recognition_.

He's found Len.

He’s found _all_ the Lens. 

Len at thirty, as Mick remembers him best, young enough for irrepressible energy but old enough to be grumpy about it. 

Len at fourteen, as Mick first met him, a skinny bundle of bones with greedy eyes and light fingers.

Len at twenty two, bright and eager and enthusiastic, circles under his eyes from raising Lisa. 

Len at forty, clad in supervillain parka and practicing his speeches on Mick, apology and forgiveness all at once.

And there's the Len that Mick never knew: Len at four, chubby cheeked and happy; Len at eight, a beaten dog that doesn't understand what he's done wrong; Len at sixty, old and tetchy but still as clever as ever. 

Len at eighty, curled up comfortably, old and smiling and content with a life long-lived.

Len at thirty-eight, weeping over his partner's burned, comatose body. 

That last one is a stab - he'd never known that Len had done that, that Len had screamed at the nurse trying to separate them that they were married and he had a right to be there, that he had slept for three days in a crappy plastic chair until the doctors had confirmed that everything would be okay.

Just like Len, not to mention that.

"What do I do?" he asks Life-in-Despair, who still lingers.

"Find him," she answers.

And he nods. Len is in them, all of them, but only one of them contains eternity, a human soul that lights the sky.

He doesn't bother examining them: they are all Len, and all are him, and he could spend eternity here learning about each of them. 

Instead, he closes his eyes and blanks his mind.

Len is his hope, his guiding star, his true north.

Len’s gotten him this far.

Please.

At first there's nothing.

But then -

A memory curls in at the corner of his mind, slowly shading in the lines and colors.

It's nothing special. A day in fall, not too hot, not too cold; raining a little. They're in their thirties; Lisa, adult enough now to be on her own, has come to visit. They have watched movies all day. Mick cooked. There was a popcorn war, and then they made s’mores on the stoves and stuffed their faces with delight.

Lisa's asleep on the armchair.

Len is curled up into Mick's arms on the couch, his fear of intimacy fading just enough to permit him this. There are no open warrants, for once, and they pulled off a heist a few weeks before, a big one that went perfectly. They're rich, they're free, they're together. 

It's quiet but for the rain. 

It's perfect.

"I could live a hundred years in this moment," Len said.

"And then you'd be old," Mick had teased, breaking the feeling of it. 

He opens his eyes. He's not that man anymore - he would never break that moment now, but let it go on and on as long as he could, would luxuriate in it, wouldn't fear feeling every damn second of it - but he remembers.

He doesn't need a guide. 

He knows Len.

He opens his eyes.

Life-in-Death waits before him. Her eyes are avid, her fingers keen, her mouth bright and red. He sees that there is more of her, too - Lisa young and innocent, Lisa older and freer still, but only two more.

Three in total.

Hecate Three-in-one, they call her; the Morrigan, the Moirai. Child-Mother-Crone, they say of her, and they worship her, but here in the dark she is not guide but guardian. 

She of the three heads snarled and bit and barked and slept when clever Orpheus came; she wove visions over the graves of the heretics for starry-eyed Dante; she told lies made of nothing but the truth to doomed Macbeth. 

He knows her, too.

"Well?" she asks, and her eyes shine with the glee of victory close at hand. "Where is he?"

He smiles.

"In the ice."

Her smile freezes.

The Sphinx at Thebes looked just so, when Oedipus answered her riddle. 

Oh, he would love to see Len in that moment, that remembered moment, that perfect peace, forever and always warm and safe in the arms of his lover, eyes on his sister, safe and happy, the rain keeping the world away. It would be heaven for Len.

But the Len he knows has never loved himself so.

No.

If that was heaven, then Len has cast himself to hell.

And for Len, there is only one hell for which he deems himself fit, and he knew of it long before Len told the whole world.

"The lake of ice," he tells Cerberus, who has grown large and monstrous. "Where they put the traitors to kin."

No Sheol for Len, full of the screams of lost souls, ever-wandering, no. For him is the freezing wasteland, for the father he could never please and later killed, for the sister he felt he failed, for the partner who he loved but left behind. 

Cold enough to freeze all the tears of regret that Len has never shed.

Now that he looks at the Lens, he sees the truth: the only thing they have in common is the blank look in their eyes, the stillness behind them, for there are no eyes here, in this valley of dead stars, this hollow valley, this trap.

He turns and finds the one Len whose eyes still shine: trapped forever in that terrible moment when he turned the cold gun, whose capacities he knew better than any other, upon himself, the moment the ice froze the blood and muscle and nerves and bone. The moment where he gave up his livelihood, gave up his life, for a chance – only even a chance – of saving his partner.

How could he do any less, to save Len?

He reaches out and touches that one, and abruptly the valley is empty, his choice is made.

"Am I right?" he asks Cerberus mildly, because he never met a monster he didn't want to fight.

She disappears, the three-in-one, and that is all the confirmation he requires.

The path is still beneath his feet.

"Walk, then," she hisses in his ear. "Walk forth, nameless traveler. Your journey is not yet done – you have found the soul, but not yet the body."

He walks.

He thinks, perhaps, that Len is behind him, now; he has reached the pit and now must climb the mountain of Purgatory to make it home. 

Going up is always harder than going down, and going down was hard enough. 

He sees the albatross far away before him, a single point of light in the darkness, and he remembers hope.

He walks.

He does not look behind him.

Just in case.

He wonders where he will find a living body here, in the land of the dead.

The path winds upwards, slow and sure, and he gains heart from it. He is a nameless traveler, but he has faced three tests: the reproach of the dead, the swamp of grinding sloth where the suicides curl up as trees, and the prison of self-hatred. He has bearded Cerberus in its lair and has walked alongside Life-in-Death without fear. 

And best of all, he feels a gaze itching between his shoulder blades. 

It might be his imagination.

But perhaps not.

His steps are sure, his spine straight, and he imagines he can see the albatross guiding him up.

And then the path turns abruptly left, and when he turns with it, his mouth drops open and the air in his lungs leaves him in a single huff, as though he'd been punched in the gut.

It's not fair.

It's not _fair_.

They should not have asked this of him.

Before him lies a river of fire.

It delights his soul, the siren sound of it, the crackle and the snap, the heat that beats on his face even from here, cracking his lips and baking his skin, and it is beauty beyond the concept of beauty to him. It is the balm to the anxiety that pricks the center of his soul, the restlessness that dogged him for as long as he can remember.

He finds that he has gone several steps towards the river, all unknowing. 

The river feeds into the boiling sea and upon the river there stands a ferryman.

There is a ferryman in every such story. The only question is what shall be needed to pay his price.

He draws near, then nearer, and then he is there, standing upon the dock.

The ferryman, who has no eyes and a face made of shadows, smiles and says, "Welcome."

It is the voice that sings in his sleep, dreams and nightmare both; it is his greatest love, it is his most hated foe, it is his holiest of holies. The agony and the ecstasy - 

The flame itself speaks to him.

He stands mute before the ferryman, unable to speak, and yet he must. He must, he must, but it is so hard to remember what it is that he must demand. Here his sorrows are lifted, here his dreams are fulfilled. Here there is no pain but that which he invites into himself; here is the fuel that drives his spirit; here is the meat and drink of his soul.

He raises his eyes to the open flame of the river.

At the very top, between the barest tips of the tongues of fire as they beat their fury into the air, whipped by inexorable passion, he sees a glimmer of light that comes from beyond the flames.

A white light, the merest pinprick, and rimming around her, like the iris to a pupil, is a cloak of many colors. 

The albatross.

He'd been following her - he'd perjured his faith, he'd ignored the call of the flame, and for what? For -

Hope.

Eyes of many colors, blue and hazel and brown and gold.

He's never won this battle before.

He has to win it now.

Len's counting on him more than ever.

"What do you want?" the ferryman asks, that voice of voices ringing in his ears.

He opens his mouth to ask for safe passageway, but what comes out is "I want Len."

His voice is weak and ragged, pained and small and miserable like it hasn't been since he was a child. He sounds like a child, begging for his favorite toy that daddy took away. 

The ferryman smiles - grotesque and glorious, a skull-grin that stretches too wide - and offers him a cup.

"You have given much, and so you may take," the ferryman says. 

He takes the cup and stares at it. He's not sure what he's supposed to do with it - it's empty, a round plain ceramic container with no handles or differentiation, and the only thing around is the river of fire, but surely that can't be..?

"Why?" he asks plaintively.

"This river finds its beginning in the heart of a star," the ferryman says. "This is its end."

Understanding is slow in dawning, but dawn it does.

He has the soul. What he needs is the body.

And what are our bodies if not the ashes of burnt-out star-stuff?

His gaze drops down to the river, which flickers red and yellow and orange and white and blue and a thousand other colors. It looks real, it sounds real, it smells real.

This is going to hurt.

He takes the cup in one hand and clenches his fingers around its unbroken edge as hard as he can manage, and he kneels by the churning shores of the river of heat, and he dips his hand into where he last saw white and blue, despite knowing it will be even hotter than the yellow, because Len would like it better that way. 

It does hurt.

It hurts more than he could have ever imagined.

He thought he knew pain, that he had been burnt before, but that was nothing - every part of him screams, even his mouth, and his fingers feel as though they are melting, the flesh sloughing off like so much ash, the smell of blood and burnt and -

He pulls his hand out.

The pain stops.

His hand is unblemished.

The cup is filled with fire.

"Well done," the ferryman says. 

He nods, too shell-shocked even to wipe the tears from his face.

He looks up at the ferryman, not rising from his knees. "Will you let me pass?" he asks.

The ferryman regards him for a long moment. "I will take you to the other side," he says finally. "To where your path continues. But only you can decide if you may pass."

He understands all too well what the ferryman means.

Even with the memory of pain lingering, he finds his eyes straying, his head turning, the flames singing out his name, and he knows if he lets them take him, he could be here forever amongst the crashing atoms of the death of a thousand million stars. 

But it's still nothing but a graveyard.

He has the hope of more than that.

He climbs into the boat, and the ferryman takes him onward.

He clings to his cup and he wraps his lips around Len's name and prays to the only thing that could ever draw him away from his flames.

The journey takes forever and a day, and he feels as though he has endured every minute of it. 

But at the other side his companion Life-in-Death, the Three-faced Hag, Lisa - glorious, wonderful, simple, beloved Lisa - waits for him.

He fixes his gaze upon her and does not let himself look at anything else, not the flames, not the dock, not the ferryman, not even the path beneath his feet, not until he is by her side.

"I have crossed," he tells her.

"You have," she agrees. She sounds approving, for once. It was a hard test to pass. "Give me the cup, and I will give you a man."

He hesitates.

"I swear upon the start," she adds, amused. "The weft and hue, the loom and the thread - and the twist." 

He gives it to her, recognizing that she has changed again: not Moirai at all right now, no, not the cruel weavers of fate and destiny. He's looking at her truest form, singular and unlike any other.

Tyche: Lady Luck, Mistress Chance, Mazel and Shimazel both; the spin of the wheel and the adventurer's byword, the flip of a coin that determines everything. 

Len's patron goddess, if he ever had one.

She takes the cup and it disappears in her hands, and then she reaches out and grabs his shoulders, staring at him right in the eye. 

"I have reformed him," she says. "And your journey, which has been long, is almost done: there is but one last test."

He nods.

"Then I tell you only these words of caution, one you know and one you don't: don't look back, and -"

Her eyes shine black as the pit of entropy in which they now stand.

"- _run_."

He runs.

He runs as he has never run before. He was never built for speed; he is powerful, not fast. He withstood the tide, he did not outrun it. But now he runs, and he doesn't look back, and behind him there is a scream like he has never heard before:

A Great Eater at risk of losing one of its prey.

He runs.

The scream rises and rises like the wind in a hurricane until -

"Mick!"

It's Len's voice.

It's _Len_.

"Mick, hold up a damn second!"

He runs.

"Damnit, Mick! Wait! I'm falling behind!"

He runs.

"Mick! It's catching up with me! Just fucking wait! Just - listen to me, for once in your life!"

He runs.

Tears stream down his face, but he runs.

"Mick! _Mick!_ "

He claws at his face, a habit he thought he'd grown out of years ago, turning his nails on himself when his anxiety grew too great and there was no way to make fire, and his nails gouge long tracks in his cheeks.

He runs.

"Mick! No! Mick, don't leave me here!"

He runs.

" _Mick!_ "

And then a scream.

He runs.

_Don't look back._

And then, worst of all, there aren't any more words. No more words, no more sounds, no more scream, no more presence, just the absolute certainty that there is nothing behind him, that Len has fallen, that he is far behind him.

The feeling scratches at his eyeballs and tears at his throat, demanding - insisting - just one quick check -

_Don't look back._

This is a test of trust and a test of faith.

He forces himself to look ahead, nails digging into his temples as he forces himself to keep his face from turning, hands on both sides of his head to fight against his own instincts, and in the distance he sees her.

The albatross, large and glorious and beautiful, white and shining, and beneath her is a ship.  
Not his own, for that was torn apart, but another - older than his, of strange make, but a ship nonetheless, and it will carry him upon the waves of time if only he can make it.

He is abruptly certain, certain as the pit, that if he reaches that ship he will be safe - but he, and he alone, and what use is all this if he is still alone at the end? 

But she told him not to look back, and she told him to run, and she is as close to Len as he can get in this pit of horrors, this land of the dead, and he will trust in her, in Len, when every fiber of his being cries out that she has lied.

He trusts in his hope.

He has to.

Faith is the substance of things unseen.

And all the things unseen, the nightmares that you wake up after panting and terrified but know not of what you dreamt, are chasing after Mick now, and they're getting closer.

He runs.

His lungs are burning, his eyes are aflame, his head pounds, but he runs.

His muscles scream, his joints lock up, his feet drive iron nails up his heel and toes with every step he takes, but he runs.

He runs -

And then he's there, the ship is there, the path leads there, and he throws himself forward into the ship and suddenly he's tumbling-tumbling-tumbling for forever and eternity and -

Silence.

He opens his eyes. 

He's on the bridge of a ship. It is not one he has ever piloted before, but some principles of design are universal. In the window of the bridge he sees that they are falling further and further away from that rarest of sights in the theorized universe: a white hole.

A knot of spacetime with no start and no origin, which nothing may enter but through which you may leave.

His albatross.

They are back in normal space.

And so he turns, barely daring to hope, barely able to make himself twist enough to see, to check, at last to know -

Len is lying there beside him, just as he remembers him, blinking awake even as he stares at him. 

"Len," he whispers. "Len. _Len_..."

He cannot say anything else.

Len's beautiful eyes widen and dart around, before fixing on his face, and then he smiles. "You got me out," he says, as if he knew it all along, as if there was never any doubt, as if his faith in him was as great as his in Len.

"I gave up my name for you," he says helplessly, when he means to say 'Of course' and 'I was always coming for you.' He doesn't know why. It's not important, a name, not when he could have this.

Len smiles, and reaches out, and he trembles at the touch of Len's hands, human-warm and Len-cool, as Len cups his face in his palms.

"That's okay," Len says. "You're my Mick; that's who you are."

And so he is, and was, and will forever be.

Len's Mick.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Sailor's Sorrow [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14674007) by [litrapod (litra)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/litra/pseuds/litrapod)




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